The Catcher in the Rye

Manila
melted under my feet
that evening
as I walked back to the dorm.

Germie, as always, lay on her chest on her bed strewn with books on the lives of saints. She only turned around briefly to tell me how painful the deaths had been and went back to reading, her legs propped in mid-air.

The electronics didn't keep the heat out of the room. (I wondered out-loud to Germie, how people could possibly make love in such heat. She laughed and called me crazy.)And the walls were no guard aginst the shouts that bounced at the dorm gate from the tricycle stand.

It was on one of those evenings drowned in paper-writing and youtube videos that I discoved a line for you in my head. "How are you?" I typed and dashed it off with a click at SEND. Not that I missed you. How could I have missed you when I didn't even have a memory of you then? You were just a a voice that said "Thank you" over the phone. But if I had thought hard enough, I might have recalled the Pikachu tattoo. Who knows! But that was before we became grown-ups.

Anyhow, I had no memory of you at that time.

Months later, we would sit across the table on our first meeting; you trying hard to guess if what fluttered on my eyelids was blue dust and I would gaze at your voice and decide to read "The Catcher in the Rye" again.